The Irish Examiner reported recently in an article titled "Government websites inaccessible, says report" that the use of PDF is "undermining [Ireland] Government efforts to create an inclusive web presence and achieve full accessibility conformance."
"More than 90 percent of Irish Governmental websites are inaccessible to people with disabilities, a new report has found.
Initial results from the eGovernment Benchmarking survey reveals that overuse of inaccessible PDF documents is creating significant difficulties for people with disabilities."
The cited report, due to be published in late March, "aims to benchmark the performance of 40 public sector websites in Ireland and the UK."
Meanwhile, an article titled "Govt forces web rules" posted on a New Zealand Web site reports that "Most government websites will have to be changed to meet new design rules, creating a potential bonanza for web developers."
According to the article, a recently completed report concluded that "people who have disabilities, live in the wrong place, or can't afford the latest technology face difficulties accessing government websites."
Among the revised guidelines -- voluntary rather than mandated:
"Any website document that is in the popular PDF format will have to be available in HTML code as well."
A representative of the local IT community called the latter suggestion "narrow-sighted," adding that it would "increase publishing cost without necessarily creating extra benefits given that PDFs are easy to create and upload. Government departments will be forced to adopt content management systems or increase their internal Web development skills."
MORE INFO
- Planet PDF Forum
- PDF Store
- Adobe Reader 6.0 - free downloads from the PDF Store
- ARTS PDF - Custom Adobe Acrobat & PDF software and solutions
